Divinity Road by Martin Pevsner Page A

in the years that followed, in deference to that postcard, he’s made a habit of starting each new sketchbook with a desert scene, a ritual like a cat marking his territory.
    As his mind turns to Nuala, he experiences a stab of pain, and so flicks through the sketches that follow in an attempt to distract himself. The drawings are the fruits of his South African stay. He’s been harbouring a vague idea to turn them into a collection, perhaps contrasting these African images with corresponding ones from Oxford. But now, surrounded by the brutal devastation, the idea seems absurd and he wonders whether there will ever be another exhibition.
    He glances at the first sketch, a market scene, an attempt to represent the turmoil and chaos as the township shoppers mingled with the hawkers and traders, the page a scribbled maelstrom of activity. It was Farai’s wife, Rose, who’d taken him to the marketplace to buy mealie meal and vegetables. After all, she’d said, the living need to eat. Looking up from the sketch, he pictures her grieving face and feels a biting loneliness. He turns the page quickly.
    The second sketch depicts a patch of Rose’s back garden cleared for vegetables, a few straggly maize plants. The third a full-length study of one of Farai’s neighbours, an elderly woman, sitting shelling nuts on her stoep. He recalls the smooth crack crack crack as she removed the nuts from their husks, her delicately-lined face, her questioning eyes, seeing with annoyance that all these features he has failed to capture to his satisfaction. He turns the page in frustration.
    The next three sketches are of a teapot and cups he’d drawn in Rose’s kitchen, then a beerhall scene inspired by a farewell drink he’d had with Farai and his cousin, and another draft he’d made of a couple he’d observed at the club they’d gone to afterwards. The feeling of bonhomie they inspire seems so recent yet so far away.
    The last sketch is a head-and-shoulders portrait of Farai and two of his offspring, Edward and Albertina. The image of family togetherness in the midst of their bereavement is poignant, and his train of thought takes him from Farai’s family to his own, to Nuala and Beth and Sammy. In trying to find a few moments of relief from his current trauma, he realises he’s returning to memories of what he has at least temporarily lost. It’s a bitter-sweet sensation. He closes his eyes and the pages turn and he feels something close to comfort, something close to an ache.
    Pull yourself together. He snaps the sketch pad shut and returns it carefully to the depths of his backpack.
    He dozes, wakes, then falls into a deeper sleep. He wakes again at sunset, retreats to the protection of the hut.
    He’s just debating whether to hike on for a few hours or spend the night where he is when he hears a child’s voice followed by the sound of an adult’s rebuke. He picks up the rifle and peers through the door of the hut, careful to keep the bulk of his body concealed.
    The woman’s in her thirties, he guesses. She’s wearing a colourful but ragged dress, a pattern of orange and lime green swirls, a matching wrap around her waist, a headscarf falling to her shoulders. The children, both primary school age, one boy, one girl, walk by her side. He’s naked save for a pair of filthy shorts, she’s wearing a torn pink frock. They are all bare-footed and empty-handed.
    The mother pulls up by the fire and looks around hopelessly. She’s muttering, her voice soft yet poignant. He reads the anguish in her gestures, sensing that it must be her home that she’s fled. He tries to picture this environment as peaceful, harmonious, domestic, and wonders where the rest of her family is, who has survived, who will not return. The children’s faces are stony, etched with exhaustion. He feels his presence at this scene of mourning as an intrusion. When he can bear it no longer, he clears his throat loudly and steps out of the hut.
    The